Showing Boyle the volume Colorado Butterflies
This butterfly which I discovered has nothing to do with nymphets. I discovered it in the Grand Canyon in 1941. I know it occurs here, but it is difficult to find. I hope to find it today. I’ll be looking for it. It flies in the speckled shade early in June, though there’s another brood at the end of the summer, so you came at the right time….Another group of butterflies I’m interested in are called Blues. This I discovered in Telluride in southwest Colorado.
Showing Boyle Alexander Klots’s A Field Guide to the Butterflies, and the sentence “The recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus.”
The thrill of gaining information about certain structural mysteries in these butterflies is perhaps more pleasurable than any literary achievement.
On Lycaeides melissa samuelis
I discovered it and named it samuelis after Samuel Scudder, probably one of the greatest lepidopterists who ever lived. Karner is a little railway station between Schenectady and Albany. People go there on Sundays to picnic, shedding papers and beer cans. Among this, the butterfly.
Over breakfast
The Southwest is a wonderful place to collect. There’s a mixture of arctic and subtropical fauna. A wonderful place to collect.
On a trail by Oak Creek Canyon
This Nabokov’s Wood Nymph is represented by several subspecies, and there’s one here. It is in this kind of country that my wood nymph occurs.
Pointing to a butterfly under a leaf and noting the white spots on the wings
Disruptive coloration. A bird comes and wonders for a second. Is it two bugs? Where is the head? Which side is which? In that split second the butterfly is gone. The second saves that individual and that species. You may call it a large Skipper.
After netting a butterfly
This is a checkered butterfly. There are countless subspecies. The way I kill is the European, or Continental, way. I press the thorax at a certain point like this. If you press the abdomen, it just oozes out. This is a beauty! Such a beautiful fresh specimen. Melitaea anicia. It’s safe in the envelope until I can get to a laboratory and spread it.
Advice on technique
The thing is, when you hit the butterfly, turn the net at the same time to form a bag in which the butterfly is imprisoned.
On spotting, netting, and releasing a butterfly
A large male! I’m not going to kill it. A common species.
Noticing another butterfly
A dusky-wing Skipper. Common.
Noticing an Epargyreus clarus, a silver-spotted Skipper
I’ve seen that same individual on the same twig since I’ve been here. There are lots of butterflies around, but this individual will chase the others from its perch.
Noticing a day-flying Peacock moth
In quest of a female. It only quiets down at certain hours of the day, I have found them asleep on flowers. Oh, this is wretched work. Where is my Wood Nymph? It’s heartbreaking work. Wretched work, I’ve traveled thousands of miles to get a species I never got. We went to Fort Davis, Texas, but there was no Wood Nymph. Toad-like sheep with their razor-sharp teeth had eaten everything. Horrible!
After returning from rushing off the trail after a butterfly
There I did something I shouldn’t have done. I went up there without looking for rattlesnakes, but I suppose God looks after entomologists as He does after drunkards.
Spotting another butterfly
Ah. Oh, that’s an interesting thing! Oh, gosh, there it goes. A white Skipper mimicking a Cabbage butterfly belonging to a different family. Things are picking up. Still, they’re not quite right. Where is my Wood Nymph? It is heartbreaking work. Wretched work.
After returning to the cabin for Véra, and when the car does not start
The car is nervous.
After noticing with delight the name Chipmunk Apartments
They have considerably improved all the motels across the country. No comparison with what they were in the early ’40s, I shall never forget the motel-keeperess who said, when I complained that they didn’t have hot water, “Was there any hot water on your grandmother’s farm?”
Watching a swarm of butterflies around a puddle
These are all males and this is their pub. They suck moisture in the ground, in mountains, European mountains, where the mules have passed and pissed, it’s like a flowery carpet. And it’s always the males. Always the males.
On a butterfly sipping nectar from yellow asters
Here’s a butterfly that’s quite rare. You find it here and there in Arizona. Lemonias zela. I’ve collected quite a few. It will sit there all day. We could come back at four, and it would still be here. The form of its wings and its general manner are very mothlike. Quite interesting. But it is a real butterfly. It belongs to a tremendous family of South American butterflies, and they mimic all kinds of butterflies belonging to other families. Keeping up with the Smiths, you know.
Capturing another butterfly
Now here is something I really want. “One flick, one dart, and it was in his net.” I’m not suggesting anything. A Checker, but it seems to be another form of the butterfly we took earlier. Quite interesting. I would like to take some more.
Missing a butterfly
Chort! I have been doing this since I was five or six, and I find myself using the same Russian swear words. Chort means the devil. It’s a word I never use otherwise.
Catching another butterfly, backhanded
Haha! Haha! A prize! One of the best things I’ve taken so far. That’s a darling. Wonderful! Ha, so unexpectedly. Haha. Look at it on this fern. What protective coloration. Callophrys. I’m not sure of the species. Isn’t it lovely? You could travel hundreds of miles and not see one. Ha, what luck! That was so unexpected, and just as I was about to say there was nothing interesting here today. A female that has hibernated. That was very nice, very nice indeed. Quite exciting. That was one of those things that make coming here worthwhile. This will go to Cornell, this little green thing. The best way to put it is, “A green Hairstreak not readily identified in the field.”
Netting two at once
I took two in one diabolical stroke of my net. A female Blue. A Lygdamus female Blue, one of the many species of Blue in which I am especially interested. This other, by freakish chance, is a male Blue of another species that was flying with it. That’s adultery. Or a step toward adultery.
Working over a dry stream bed
Quite a number of little things have appeared today which I haven’t seen before. It’s picking up. The next week will probably go much faster. I give the Wood Nymph a week to be out. I may go to Jerome for my Wood Nymph. It’s a ghost town on the side of a mountain. I know of several collectors who were there and brought back my butterfly a few years ago.
Three at once
Three with one sweep of the net. This one is an Angle Wing. It has a curiously formed letter C. It mimics a chink of light through a dead leaf. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that humorous?
After boxing the Anglewing
They won’t lose any color. I saw an Indian moth, probably taken in the middle of the eighteenth century, that had been presented to Catherine the Great, and the color was still fresh. Some of the butterflies of Linnaeus, the first great naturalist, a Swede, are quite fresh. They are less fragile, I suppose, than pickled human beings.
Heading back to Sedona
I lost two butterfly collections. One to the Bolsheviks, one to the Germans. I have another I gave to Cornell. I dream of stealing it back.
After lunch, looking at the wind-swept buttes on the way to the next hunting ground
It looks like a giant chess game is being played around us.
Waiting in a supermarket as Véra shops
When I was younger I ate some butterflies in Vermont to see if they were poisonous. I didn’t see any difference between a Monarch butterfly and a Viceroy. The taste of both was vile, but I had no ill effects. They tasted like almonds and perhaps a green cheese combination. I ate them raw. I held one in one hot little hand and one in the other. Will you eat some with me tomorrow for breakfast?
Evening, showing Boyle his long article on the Nearctic members of the genus Lycaeides Hübner
The most interesting part here was to find the structural differences between them in terms of the male organ. These are magnified thirty-four times. These are hooks which the male has to attach to the female. Because of the differences in the size of the hooks, all males cannot copulate with all females. Suddenly in Jackson Hole, I found a hook intermediate between the two. It has the form of the short-hooked species, but the length of the long-hooked species. It is almost impossible to classify, I named it longinus. This work took me several years and it undermined my health for quite a while. Before, I never wore glasses. This is my favorite work, I think I really did well there.
On Soviet awareness of his lepidopterological work: in an attack by Lubimov in the Literary Gazette
He said that I was starving in America, compelled to earn a precarious existence selling butterflies.
Next morning
We are going to Jerome, a ghost town. We are looking for my butterfly, the Wood Nymph, which should be out, I hope, on Mount Mingus.
On the way to Jerome
Butterflies help me in my writing. Very often when I go and there are no butterflies, I am thinking. I wrote most of Lolita this way. I wrote it in motels or parked cars.
Above Jerome
We’re getting into oaks and pines. The greatest enemy of the lepidopterist is the juniper tree. Charming! Charming! Charming butterfly road!
An iris-covered meadow
I can’t believe there won’t be butterflies here….I’m very much disappointed. Rien. Rien. Iris is not very attractive to butterflies anyway. It’s rather ornamental, and that’s it.
Nabokov starts narrating his lack of success
It was very sad. “And then I saw that strong man put his head on his forearms and sob like a woman.”…This will be our last stop today….It is this kind of place that my nymph should be flying, but with the exception of three cows and a calf, there is nothing.
Sad…“His face was now a tear-stained mask.”
Boyle captures a butterfly, and they head home
A winged cliché…What can I say? What is there to say? I am ashamed, for the butterflies. I apologize for the butterflies.
* “An Absence of Wood Nymphs,” Sports Illustrated, Sept. 14, 1959, E5–E8, combined also with Boyle’s slightly expanded version, “An Absence of Wood Nymphs,” in Robert H. Boyle, At the Top of Their Game (New York: Winchester Press, 1983), 124–32; see also full version in Nabokov’s Butterflies. Sports Illustrated commissioned Boyle to write on VN and the element of sport in butterfly hunting. Boyle spent June 1–2, 1959, on the hunt with VN in and around Oak Creek Canyon, Arizona, and wrote up his time as a narrative—VN himself, as he stalks butterflies, sometimes playing with the role of narrator. VN particularly wanted to find, catch, and show the butterfly he had caught in 1941 in the Grand Canyon and named Neonympha dorothea, now Cyllopsis pertepida dorothea, Nabokov’s Wood Nymph.